Written by Eric Meltzer
Thu, July 05 (13 years ago)
I realized recently that most people wait way too long to start teaching. They think they should be an expert on the topic before they try to teach it to anyone else, and so they avoid teaching opportunities until they are more confident in their own abilities.
Learning from an expert is great, because they tend to not only know more than you do, but also to have a better organized understanding of the issue that allows them to clarify your thinking in a really useful way.
However, sometimes an expert can be so far removed from the issues that beginners face that they have a hard time imparting much wisdom. When I was learning Mandarin, the things I thought were hard were things that native speakers had learned as babies. For example, saying words in the right tone was so automatic for them that they often had to think for a few seconds before they could even tell me which of the four tones a word was supposed to be in. However, a few weeks of practice with a fellow non-native speaker who had already been through the same struggles that I was going through resulted in a huge improvement ¹ .
A few days ago I got an invitation to teach from a good friend who runs a mentorship program called NFTE for aspiring entrepreneurs in San Francisco high-schools. This guy is an accomplished entrepreneur who’s sold one company already, and the other mentors at this seminar are also mostly seasoned vets. On the other hand, I’ve been doing this for less than a year. I’ve never raised a round of investment, fired anyone, or sold anything worth more than a hundred dollars.
However, I have taken a product from being an idea to being a physical thing. I learned how to make a decent video explaining the idea, how to communicate with various media folks, and how to handle manufacturing problems in a foreign city 5000 miles away. So far, about 500 people have pre-ordered our product, and once the next batch arrives from the manufacturer, we hope to sell a whole lot more. I think the experience I’ve gotten from this first project, while miniscule compared to that of the other mentors, could actually be very useful to the kids I’ll be mentoring at NFTE.
So, if you’ve been delaying teaching others because you think you aren’t ready yet, stop it. Find people who are one step behind you, and without trying to be any more of an expert than you are, teach them what you know.
1. Interestingly, once I had done that practice and my tones were decent, it was going *back* to native speaker language buddies that put the final polish on my pronunciation. The point here is that it took multiple teachers who were themselves at different levels of expertise to really do the trick.